Although they are a great time to enjoy spending time with family and friends, the holiday can also be a very stressful and disorganized time of year. With so many different activities going on at the same time, it's more important than ever to find ways to stay organized.

If you enjoy cooking and baking special treats for holiday meals, it can be helpful to get your holiday recipes organized. When recipes are organized, you'll be able to create your special favorites with far less stress and effort, making your holiday season just a bit more enjoyable. If your recipes could benefit from a better organizational system, here are some tips that you can use to get them in shape for the holiday season.

Assessing Your Recipe Collection

If you are like many people, your recipe collection consists of books, recipe cards, scraps of paper with recipes scribbled on them, and perhaps pieces of food packaging that contain printed recipes. If you add this mess to the recipes stored on your computer, or bookmarked in your browser, you can easily see how it can be difficult to keep them organized. Before you start to organize, take some time to gather all of your recipe sources together. You might find that you need two different organization strategies - one for printed recipes, and another one for online recipes. Once you've gathered all of your recipes together, you'll be ready to start the organizational process.

Creating a "Favorite Recipes" Area

Almost everyone has a collection of recipes that they make frequently, either year-round or during the holiday season. Since this collection of favorites is usually much smaller than a person's overall recipe collection, you can save a lot of time and effort by organizing these separately. For example, if you have a collection of holiday recipes that you enjoy creating for meals, parties and snacks, try organizing them all within a single book. Then, when you are ready to start your holiday cooking, the only thing you need to grab is one recipe book. As an added bonus, you might even want to make copies of this book to give as holiday gifts to other family members. By doing so, you'll be giving a gift that is sure to be cherished by countless generations to come.

Organizing the Rest of Your Holiday Recipes

Once you've separated out your absolute favorites, you can focus on organizing the rest of your holiday recipes. It can be helpful to create a notebook or recipe box divided by food type, such as soups, salads, vegetables, meats, breads and desserts. Other organization methods that can work well focus on dividing recipes by meal types, such as breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks. You should also create a special category for recipes that you'd like to try but haven't yet made, since these actually fall into a category all their own. Once you try a recipe for the first time, you can then make the determination as to whether it is a favorite or something you don't care to make again.

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